


cave paintings

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canto Bight, Complicated Relationships, Debts, F/M, Future Fic, Introspection, Multi, POV Second Person, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-07 09:49:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13432158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: It wasn’t yours to have, what they shared, and it wouldn’t have been even if you hadn’t tossed them both over for the quickest escape and the biggest payday. That just wasn’t how you rolled. It wasn’t what you did. They weren’t put into this galaxy for you. There was no key in you that could unlock them.





	cave paintings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



You weren’t always the man you were now, the shabbily-dressed slicer who skulked around Canto Bight like it was a particularly belligerent cancer and you were just the unlucky sack of meat who got stuck with it. No, that wasn’t right. That metaphor was not right at all. No, you were the parasite. Canto Bight was the hulking, brooding, flabby-skinned behemoth you sucked the fat and marrow and salt-fresh blood from whenever you got the chance. Credits, jewels, fine casks of wine from Derla Pidys’s own stores, only worthwhile for the bullshit stories she sold to tourists in this hellscape filled with dreams and glitter. You would take it all.

You’d tasted wines made with only the most spoiled of Alderaanian grapes and wines made with the most twisted, shriveled and sour vinegar berries the galaxy could offer without telling the difference between them. Sometimes, the line between good and bad was nothing but fiction.

But what were you talking about? Oh. That’s right. You weren’t always this—this guy, this nobody who got thrown into prison again and again without anyone ever noticing what it was he did and could do. Sure, you spent a night in jail on occasion. This was Canto Bight. Who didn’t? But no one ever saw the way you skimmed winnings from the third slot machine in the fourth row near the very back of the casino. That dumb trick has been running for six years now and the interest alone could buy you a cushy retirement on the artificial beaches of this glimmering shithole.

Hell, even the galaxy-renowned Master Codebreaker had gotten himself caught and spanked and sent to the glamorous time-out that was the craps table for stealing from Canto Bight’s greatest casino. They only didn’t kill him because his cachet ensured the place maintained the correct ambiance whenever he graced them with their presence. Meanwhile, you slipped into and out of the city’s finest establishments with no one the wiser, no one to care, no one to take you to task for any of it.

Not since, well. No one had ever been quite as furious at you as that girl—what was her name? Rose? And no one as disappointed as Big F. When you’d traded them to the First Order for credits and safe passage, it wasn’t supposed to be personal. This was life and death, business and power. Realism going hand-to-hand with glorious idealism.

There was a time when credits and safe passage and going through life unnoticed were _the very best things life could offer you._

It was only the safe passage that had mattered to you, really, but that fucker Phasma and Hux wouldn’t have understood that. They saw a small-time criminal in you and expected the motivation to match exactly. You blew the lot of it buying an old, half-dead fathier during one of the early morning races and was glad to see both it and the credits go about their business, the former on the grassy highlands above the city and the latter, well. Let someone else suffer under the weight of that money’s history.

Even you couldn’t rig a fathier, not without involving a third party. You could respect fathiers for that. For a moment, you were kind of proud of the one you bought for trying despite itself.

Still, Rose wouldn’t have understood your motivations either. Finn, Finn may have, but it would probably require more soul-searching than either of you would want to engage in to get there.

Why you thought of them at all was… a whole lot of melancholic bullshit was what that was.

Not that it was anything new. It’d been a long time since they did their number on your stomping grounds and yet still you wondered. There were tales, rumors. The Resistance survived. You didn’t have it in you to believe Finn and Rose specifically managed to escape the Supreme Leader’s flagship, but the infinitisimally small part of you that still found itself moved by stories of Jedi standing against AT-ATs wanted to believe that those plucky assholes got out of there and were giving the First Order the hell they so rightfully deserved.

You wondered what they would be like now, with a few years of experience under their belts and time enough to learn the cruel vagaries of the galaxy around them. They’d go from plucky to magnificent, untested to truly terrifying. It was something you’d have given up your fortunes to see. Just once.

Canto Bight could give you everything you could ever hope to want except the one thing you truly wanted:

An excuse to see them again.

If they lived, of course. Couldn’t forget that inconsequential fact, no. And your part in making it the unlikely outcome here.

You’d forgotten, for a moment, your one iron-clad rule. It wasn’t the first time. It probably wouldn’t be the last.

Don’t join.

And now you suffered for it. And they had, too.

*

The cobblestone walkways of Canto Bight’s alleys were an excellent place to lose your footing and you did so on at least three occasions on this particularly balmy night, first tripping over your shoes, then a loose brick, and finally a scurrying, burrowing creature that scuttled across the ground in front of you, a daredevil with a death wish. Despite the strings of lights overhead, you didn’t get a good look at it and you were glad for that. You didn’t need more proof that Canto Bight’s veneer had cracked into a thousand pieces around you when you weren’t looking. It used to be the place wouldn’t have been caught dead pretending it was so base as to allow vermin to roam the streets. But these were not the usual times.

With the First Order ascendant—nort least of all because of your help, you couldn’t help but recall again, it came back to that always these days, despite your favorite motto—it was better to focus entirely on the gaming tables. It was better to pretend the hand that fed was not the hand that theatened to bite. All the power resided in their hands, really, so might as well ignore them because do to anything else would be to give into fear; the First Order had all the weapons they needed. Nothing else was required of the good, honest weapons dealers of Cantonica. The rich could remain rich, but they weren’t making credits the way they did in the boom times.

The metaphorical boom times anyway.

Now that Star Destroyers stalked every major system, the booms were a little more literal than anyone cared to admit. And not quite so good for business as people wanted to believe. It was self-delusion that drove the exchange of credits for a moment of reckless fun now. Anyone with half a brain could see that the desperation that drove Canto Bight was the first and most obvious sign that they were all well and truly fucked.

Maybe Big F had been right. Maybe Rose had been right.

Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. So many maybes. They made your head spin, made you sick the way too much bad liquor too quickly made you sick.

That word haunted you, maybe. You still heard it in the same tone you remember using so long ago—had it really only been five years? It felt like so many more than that—that one time your entire philosophy of life felt like less than the pure and righteous thing you’d believed it to be. It clung to you like cobwebs that wouldn’t clear no matter how often you waved your hand around.

Not joining meant not being complicit. Playing both sides meant surviving, meant retaining independence, that most important of things. There was no greater goal than freedom. You would do anything to keep it. You had done anything to keep it.

And it grasped, dogged, to your heels, tripping you as thoroughly as the uneven terrain beneath your feet and the slosh of swill that clouded your mind. You’d rather be consumed by a rathtar than admit it, but you might’ve fucked up big time. Not only because you felt guilty as hell about it, which you did, but also because the First Order really was kind of a drag on the vicious, arrogant bonhomie with which you walked through life. Whatever else the New Republic was, the Resistance, Rebellion, whatever the fuck they called themselves these days, they didn’t interfere in the game of charades that was Canto Bight.

That didn’t make them good. In fact, it probably made them bad. Canto Bight deserved to be taken down a peg and the only people in the whole damned galaxy—until the First Order took over and began pulling some serious shit, like putting troopers on the ground to ‘maintain the peace and respectability of Canto Bight’s most important and illustrious of populations’—who’d seen fit to do anything were some punk kids on a mission too big for their experience combined.

They’d failed, of course, being too young for the job they’d taken on, but they’d also put a sizable dent in the Cantonican economy before they did, which was more than most people could say about… anything.

 _You can stop thinking about them at any time,_ your inner voice said, bitter, as you stumbled toward your skeevy little hideout. It wasn’t the sort of place you’d imagined yourself ending up as a kid back home, but then again, you never imagined you’d find yourself balanced on the edge of a knife your entire life either. At least it was safe, impregnable, nothing like a knife’s edge. No one in Canto Bight even knew it existed.

As you scuffled toward it, the winding alleys as familiar as your favorite slicer’s kit, you imagined just… sitting down here and now, not moving along any further, not doing anything else at all. No decisions, no joining, no not joining, no pushing or prying or racketeering your way through the day-to-day.

No more jail cells. That would be nice. No thinking either. Sounded relaxing. Sounded like a load of bantha shit, too.

With a sigh, you reached the entrance and tapped out with the heel of one boot the sequence of vibrations that would reveal that this particular stretch of brick opened into something more, opened into a tunnel, a dank cave, a—

It didn’t take you long to realize something was wrong.

It didn’t take you any time at all, in fact.

You hadn’t been home in a while. That meant dust and dankness and the humid, stale warmth of poorly circulated air.

This place had been cracked open recently, more recently than the last time you came to ground. Hell, that dust that shouldn’t yet be kicked up still swirled in the air from how recently it had been disturbed. What little light spilled through from above confirmed it. For a moment, you wished you’d thought to carry a blaster. Then you were just angry. Angry that someone on this Force-damned planet finally figured it out and now you’d have to—

You’d have to…

You’d have to face up to it was what you’d have to do. All of your most sensitive equipment lived there. You’d never make it without that shit. Or, well. You would, but it would be so painfully, tediously difficult to build up from nothing…

Credits could buy a lot of things, but they couldn’t get you twenty years’ worth of custom doodads you’ve got stacked in there. Every sort of job you could do had been done with something from this place. It housed everything; it was, in all the ways that mattered, a history of you. And though you couldn’t give less of a fuck about history than you do right now, you did want to deprive whichever asshole managed to find their way down here of the treasures they were surely contemplating stealing or, if they were particularly petty, merely breaking so that you could no longer use them.

You really, really ought to have considered carrying a blaster around with you. It was the one thing you’ve never done, not in all your years of working every side. Blasters, when present, tended to go off. And you never wanted blasters to go off in your presence ever. At all. That shit hurt. And you prefer to go about your business not risking death or pain, thanks much.

Your ear sharpened as the corridor darkened. Without the light of Canto Bight above to guide you, it should have been more difficult than it was, but you knew this place better than you knew your own hands and you trusted your feet to guide you true. At first, nothing save the air seemed amiss, but as you walked, your understanding of your surroundings heightened. There was definitely someone here, or had been recently. You could almost smell it on the air, the sharpness of fear and possibility that tingled with the electric knowledge that someone soon might find themselves caught and they knew it.

You weren’t a fighter—not a very good one anyway—but you knew a thing or two. If you caught them off-guard, maybe…

Something—something quite probably valuable—clattered to the ground up ahead, far enough that it had to have been inside your home, though you hesitated to call it that. Your heart beat its never-tiring fists against your chest. Your blood throbbed in your ears, swishing with as much force as the manufactured sea around the city when its handlers decided the tourists needed something interesting to look at.

This was your stuff someone was cavorting with. They’d found their way down here and threatened your livelihood, your dreams, your goals.

How. Dare. They.

Your righteous fury propelled you forward. No more playing around, no more games. You would make them pay dearly for discovering the very center of you. They’d picked your brain. Somehow. And now they were… were just noodling around in it, finding out any number of things about you that you didn’t want them or anyone to know. And possibly breaking your shit out of ignorance or clumsiness both.

You approached the door to that place you refused to call home with less caution than you probably should have under the circumstances, but that didn’t stop you. You weren’t even thinking about that fact now. All you had was bared knuckles and bared teeth and a thorough sense of personal violation.

It would be, in retrospect, a good thing that your knuckles and teeth counted for little, because as soon as you threw open the blast door—yes, a blast door, and no, throw probably wasn’t the right word to describe it—another crash sounded and a pair of yelps and—

“Holy f-f-fuckin’ shit,” you said. If you were holding anything, you might have dropped it, too. As it was, only your third most prized pad found itself victimized on the floor at Finn’s feet. When you looked into his eyes, there was a modicum of guilt there that you liked seeing, if only because it gave you a leg to stand on. Here in Canto Bight, the value of slights was well known. You learned how to milk guilt when you needed to.

And you would most likely need to here. All things considered, a prized pad wasn’t worth much against the thick, deep stain of betrayal that existed in the fabric that bound you to Finn, to Rose, to both of them.

“Fancy meeting you here,” you added, jovial, wishing you’d dressed for the occasion. You usually wore a hat, but you’d lost it in one of your earlier spills across the streets of Canto Bight, but you couldn’t help slicking your palm through your hair in the hopes of looking a little less disheveled. Neither Finn nor Rose seem to notice one way or the other. “You’re, ah, l-looking a little w-worse for wear there.” And though it pained you to say it, it was true. Their eyes were bloodshot and the bags beneath their eyes spoke of sleepless nights and long days and everything in between. Rose glared at you a little and her mouth pinched itself small. She dared you to say something stupid and, not wanting to disappoint, you did. “Life as Rebel scum not working out too well for you?”

“Better than how Canto Bight works out for most people,” Finn answered, looking you up and down, before Rose could offer more than the daggers that had so suddenly replaced her eyes. “But you wouldn’t know about that.”

You straightened up and pulled at the lapels of your jacket. “Not really, no.” Then, your eyes dropped to Finn’s feet, where your equipment remained shattered and unlikely to ever be usable again. “But I can see your penchant for destruction hasn’t c-ceased in the meantime.” You paused. You bit your lip. You widened your eyes just the teeniest bit, a smidgen, a barely there fluttering of your eyelashes in response. You weren’t innocent. You’d never been innocent, but you could pretend with the best of them. “What do you want exactly?”

The problem with questions like these were you didn’t want the answer and you couldn’t have answered if the question were posed to you in return, a dangerous proposition indeed. Knowing the answer was ninety percent of the game. And never asking anything you weren’t certain about was nine percent of the rest.

That last one percent was where all your luck lived.

But luck, Finn, and Rose didn’t go together and they certainly didn’t belong here in his home either.

“We need your help,” Rose said finally. Her arms folded across her chest and her chin tipped up. “Actually, we’re not going to leave without it, so there’s really no point in arguing with us.”

They were so bright, so fiercely devoted to their cause. It shouldn’t have moved you as much as it did. Earnest people were a credit-a-dozen and you’d swindled more than half of them in your lifetime alone. Once upon a time, you disdained that sort of person. Now you wished you knew how to be one, if only to better understand the appeal of serving the side of right. And it was, you knew, the side of right. Or, at least the side with more claim to it than the First Order. Canto Bight practically ran on First Order funding at this point, no matter what you once might have said about arms deals coming from both sides. People had grown more venal, more… disgusting and desperate.

It wasn’t fun anymore.

It wasn’t even hard.

Finn nodded, ready to back Rose up in case she needed it, adoration and admiration for her so clear and reflected back at him in her eyes, too. It would make you sick if you didn’t think it was so sweet. And you wouldn’t have thought it was so sweet if you didn’t feel a twinge of envy. They’d grown closer to each other in the years that stretched between you.

It wasn’t as though anything—you didn’t want…

It wasn’t yours to have, what they shared, and it wouldn’t have been even if you hadn’t tossed them both over for the quickest escape and the biggest payday. That just wasn’t how you rolled. It wasn’t what you did. They weren’t put into this galaxy for you. There was no key in you that could unlock them.

The realization made you sadder than you would have expected, sadder than you wanted to be. Reality never made you sad. Even at its most disappointing, it only ever was what it was and would only ever be what it would be. There was no point in sadness over the fact.

“You owe us,” Rose said, her anger twisted and coiled up in the stress she placed on each word. She strode toward him and jammed her finger against his sternum. Her eyes flashed and you’d never seen anything quite so stunning in your life.

You raised your hands and shook your head. Innocent, you said without saying a thing. I’m innocent. “I’m not arguing, d-darling.” Your eyes skipped to Finn, who arched his eyebrow and considered you. “What do you need?”

“What’s your price?” Finn asked, biting. None of the chagrined young man of a few moments ago who dropped your shit remained.

You considered his question, tilting your head. Leave them guessing was always a favored method with you, but it wouldn’t work here. You didn’t want it to work here. You were tired of playing the mysterious cad who could jump one way or the other. They already knew you were a snake in the grass, primed to strike at the most opportune moment. They’d be on the look-out. Even if you wanted to fuck them over for credits or glory or salvation, they’d know and cut you off. “No price,” you say, earnest. “Rose is right about that. I know what debts look like.”

Finn tilted his head down, looked up at you through lowered lashes. “Just tell us. Seriously. We don’t have all day.”

“No price,” you said again. “I’ll do it. Balance the books.”

You couldn’t admit that just seeing them again was payment enough. You didn’t think they’d understand.

But in that moment, the three of you standing together again, you were willing to do just about anything for them, prove that you’re willing to be a monster for both sides. You didn’t join, but when pressed…?

When pressed, you were willing to commit. Not to a cause. Not to a thing. But to people? For a short time?

You could do that.

Just this once, you actually wanted to.


End file.
